Days of the week in Dutch: maandag to zondag, IPA, abbreviations, use

Moon, Sun, Saturn and four Germanic gods

Dutch took the Roman planetary week and translated it. Wiktionary traces maandag through Middle Dutch manendach back to a Proto-West Germanic phrase meaning day of the moon, and zondag to a calque of Latin dies Solis, the day of the sun. English Monday and Sunday, German Montag and Sonntag are the same two translations.

For four of the weekdays the Germanic speakers put their own gods in place of the Roman ones. Woensdag is Woden's day, standing for Latin dies Mercurii. Donderdag is the day of the thunder god, built on donder, thunder, where Latin had Jupiter. Vrijdag goes back to Frija, modelled on dies Veneris, the day of Venus. Dinsdag is the least transparent: Middle Dutch had dinsendach, which Wiktionary links to a word for a public assembly and to a god of justice.

Zaterdag kept the Roman name. Middle Dutch saterdach is a loan translation of dies Saturni, so Saturday is the only Dutch day that still carries a Latin god. The days of the week in many languages put the Dutch row beside German, Frisian and the Scandinavian languages, where the same pattern is easy to follow.

Lower case, the ij in vrijdag and the abbreviations

Dutch writes the names of the days in lower case: maandag, not Maandag. The Wikipedia article on date and time notation in the Netherlands states the rule for days and months alike. A capital appears only at the start of a sentence or inside a proper name such as Koppermaandag, which Wiktionary lists among the compounds of maandag.

Vrijdag contains ij, the letter pair that Dutch treats almost as a single letter. When a word begins with it, both letters become capitals together, so a sentence opening with Friday is written Vrijdag but a street sign with IJsselstraat capitalises IJ. The Dutch alphabet shows where ij sits among the letters.

On calendars and timetables the days shrink to two letters: ma., di., wo., do., vr., za., zo. The full stop marks the abbreviation, and the Wikipedia article on Dutch date notation lists ma., wo., vr. and zo. among its examples. Opening hours often join two of them with t/m, tot en met, up to and including: ma t/m vr is Monday to Friday.

How to use the days of the week in Dutch sentences

To say on Monday, Dutch can use the bare day or put op in front of it. Wiktionary gives both: ik kom maandag (I am coming on Monday) and its own example sentence, op maandag begin ik altijd vroeg met werken, I always start work early on Monday.

A habit takes a different form. 's Maandags means every Monday or on Mondays; the apostrophe and the s are what is left of an old genitive, des maandags, frozen into an adverb. The same works for every day: 's zaterdags, 's zondags. Maandags without the apostrophe is a common synonym.

Compounds are written as one word. Maandagavond is Monday evening, zondagmiddag Sunday afternoon, vrijdagnacht Friday night. A working day is a weekdag, and something done on weekdays is doordeweeks. The weekend is simply het weekend, a loan from English, with weekeinde as the native alternative.

Dates keep the order day, month, year: zondag 10 september 2000, all in lower case apart from the figures. Written this way, the days of the week in Dutch never need a comma after them, which English style often puts between the weekday and the date.

Netherlands and Belgium: same names, different afternoons

The seven names are identical in the Netherlands, in Flanders and in Suriname. What differs between the Netherlands and Belgium is the way the day itself is cut up, and that shows as soon as a day name is combined with a part of the day. The Flemish government's language advice service explains that in Belgium middag usually means the lunch hours between twelve and two, while namiddag covers the whole afternoon up to about six. In the Netherlands middag runs from twelve to six, and namiddag means only the late afternoon.

A Belgian appointment on woensdagnamiddag is therefore simply on Wednesday afternoon. Said in Amsterdam, the same word suggests the end of that afternoon. Voormiddag splits the same way: in Belgium the second half of the morning, in the Netherlands the early afternoon.

The weekday names do not mark a speaker as Dutch or Belgian; the words around them can. A Fleming asked when a meeting is may answer with namiddag where a speaker from Utrecht says middag, and both mean the same afternoon.